In Which We Fish With Mirrors

I started reading the site two years ago at a moment in my life when I was most impressionable: I was a young recent college graduate entering the workplace for the first time in his life, and I was on the Internet for the majority of the day. I didn’t live in New York, but Gawker made me start to regret my decision to move to Chicago instead of the Big Apple. And while I’d been revealing too much about my personal life online for years (from “diaries” to “journals” to “blogs“), it wasn’t until I started reading Gawker that I realized that one could actually be talented at it.

Something has changed, however, and it has happened drastically.

jessica coen

A little over a year ago, when Jessica Coen left the site, an (older) friend of mine told me that Gawker just didn’t feel the same to him. He felt like the new regime wasn’t as entertaining as the one before it. Looking back, I feel the same way about the new regime-change. I had huge Internet crushes on Choire Sicha and Emily Gould.

Blue States Lose was reduced to a random feature that occurred occasionally during the week (and, come to think of it, I haven’t seen it lately). Tionna “Tee” Smalls was famously fired from her column, which seemed to only exist to make fun of its author in the first place. And how about my personal favorite, The Unethicist? (Gabe, you’re a gem.)

gould and smalls

It’s possible that we should have seen this coming. What originally instigated Choire and Emily‘s resignations was Nick Denton‘s pay-per-page view system, which rewarded the bloggers who were able to publish posts that attracted more site visits. So, to make an analogy, the author of a National Treasure: Book of Secrets-style post would make more money than the author of a There Will Be Blood-kind of post. But does that make it RIGHT?

(Honestly, if Alex Carnevale, the Denton of This Recording, wanted me to write more popular columns for money, I’d be writing about The Hills rather than fucking GAWKER.)

Now that the blog Gawker has become the story – as several other blogs, websites, and even (gasp!)theNew York Timespublish articles about the site – Gawker has become incredibly self-referential. Will Nick Denton instruct his bloggers to continue writing about themselves and, perhaps more importantly, Him?

But is that even surprising? It’s not even possible for a blog to get negative press, as any link will provide a positive result. What I think is more telling of Gawker’s unpopularity is that the people who have so strongly supported the blog in the past have started to turn against it.

In Gawker Media’s defense, there is Jezebel, which currently serves as the internet’s It Blog.

Don’t let its tagline (“Celebrity, Sex, Fashion. Without Airbrushing”) fool you; it’s not a gossip blog, it doesn’t fuel the reputations of “in-house celebrities,” and it’s not too-“girly” in nature.

Sure, it’s certainly a website with a feminist perspective, but it’s foremost a well-written, hilarious, and perceptive blog that is appealing to both sexes. It uses its feminist stance in a way to bring in both female and male readers, as opposed to alienating a potential audience, which Gawker, despite its best intentions, somehow always manages to do.

Tyler Coates is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a blogger living in Chicago.

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